Month: January 2020

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  Is Cruise looking to replicate the McDonald's model but with ride-hailing instead of fast food?

Like a lot of autonomous vehicle (AV) developers, Cruise has been having a tough time recently. Slammed by brutal reporting on its technological struggles, the GM-, Honda-, and Softbank-backed firm recently abandoned plans for an ambitious 2019 commercial deployment of its autonomous mobility service. Adding insult to injury, its request for safety-regulation waivers allowing it to deploy a version of its fourth-generation Chevrolet Bolt without human controls has languished at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

So when Cruise unveiled its Origin robotaxi at a flashy San Francisco event last week, it was in effect a reboot of the company's plans under new CEO Dan Ammann, who came over from GM at the end of 2018. Unfortunately, after weeks of hyping a vision of mobility "beyond the car," Cruise shared almost no details about the Origin, including such basic information as its size, battery capacity, sensor suite, or deployment plans. Though it's hard to fault Cruise for erring on the side of caution, the resulting confusion and snark about Origin only highlighted how hard it has become to communicate about the autonomous vehicle space.

But even as Cruise seemed to flub its latest big communication effort, it actually provided the answer to a critical question that other AV companies have yet to address: how its robotaxi service is going to compete in an increasingly crowded mobility market. Though largely lost in the soaring, aspirational "beyond the car" messaging, both Ammann's comments and the Origin's design subtly illustrated a surprisingly grounded vision for a business that is all too often imagined as sci-fi fantasy. Put simply, it seems that the Origin will be the foundation of a business positioned to become the McDonald's of mobility.

Enlarge (credit: Mighty Travels / Flickr)

Data for as many as 30 million credit cards stolen in a recently discovered breach of an East Coast convenience store and gas station are going up for sale on one of the Dark Web’s most frequented marketplaces for buying such data, researchers said.

The Wawa chain of convenience stores said in December that it had discovered card-skimming malware on point-of-sale machines at just about all of its 850 stores. The infection began rolling out to the store's payment-processing system on March 4 and wasn't discovered until December 10. It took two more days for the malware to be fully contained. The malware collected payment-card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names.

On Monday night, Dark Web site Joker’s Stash began uploading stolen data for what it claimed were 30 million payment cards, researchers from fraud intelligence service Gemini Advisory reported in a blog post. Joker’s Stash is one of the biggest Dark Web marketplaces for buying stolen payment-card data. The anonymous site has named the lasted haul “BIGBADABOOM-III.” While the site didn't identify the Wawa hack as the source of the data, Gemini researchers said they were able to determine that was the case.

Enlarge / It's not likely to be an accident that "add WireGuard" is number one on this list. (credit: Jim Salter)

Yesterday, Linux creator Linus Torvalds merged David Miller's net-next into his source tree for the Linux 5.6 kernel. This merger added plenty of new network-related drivers and features to the upcoming 5.6 kernel, with No.1 on the list being simply "Add WireGuard."

As previously reported, WireGuard was pulled into net-next in December—so its inclusion into Linus' 5.6 source tree isn't exactly a surprise. It does represent clearing another potential hurdle for the project; there is undoubtedly more refinement work to be done before the kernel is finalized, but with Linus having pulled it in-tree, the likelihood that it will disappear between now and 5.6's final release (expected sometime in May or early June) is vanishingly small.

WireGuard's Jason Donenfeld is also contributing AVX crypto optimizations to the kernel outside the WireGuard project itself. Specifically, Donenfeld has optimized the Poly1305 cipher to take advantage of instruction sets present in modern CPUs.

Enlarge / An AT&T store in Chicago. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)

AT&T lost another 1.16 million subscribers from DirecTV and its other TV services in the final three months of 2019.

AT&T today reported a 945,000-customer net loss in its "premium TV" category, which includes DirecTV satellite, U-verse wireline TV services, and the "AT&T TV" online service that launched in Q3 and is only available in about 15 cities.

AT&T also reported a net loss of 219,000 customers from AT&T TV Now, a separate streaming service formerly known as DirecTV Now.

Enlarge / Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019. (credit: Lyu Liang | VCG | Getty Images)

A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google is working on yet another messaging app. The team from GSuite is cooking up a mobile app that "brings together the functions of several standalone apps the company already offers" into a unifying platform. Google reportedly envisions this as an enterprise communications app along the same lines as Slack or Microsoft Teams. It sounds like the same sales pitch given for the "Google Hangouts Chat" service that was developed for GSuite in 2018, but when Google messaging services come and go like the seasons of the year, you can't expect every single one to have a unique premise.

According to the report, this "new unified communications app" will merge functions from Gmail, Drive, Hangouts Chat, and Hangouts Meet. Slack already lets you send messages, share files, and do video chats, which covers most of these apps. Pulling in features from Gmail, though, like the last email you sent the person you're messaging, would be unique and genuinely useful. One alarming thing about the report is that it refers to this service as a "mobile app" and doesn't mention anything about a Web or desktop app, which is how many employees primarily use Slack.

News that the app will pull in Hangouts Chat features makes us wonder what will happen to the actual Hangouts Chat service. One of the current plans in the Google messaging mess is to merge Google's biggest consumer chat platform, Hangouts, with Hangouts Chat, its current enterprise chat platform (despite the similar names, the two apps are unrelated). If Hangouts Chat is merging into something else, does that mean the plan to migrate consumer Hangouts over isn't happening?

Enlarge (credit: Michael Mees)

Quantifying the continuing cost of the increasing threat of climate change is, roughly speaking, impossible. Even just focusing on the financial impacts is daunting, much less putting a number on human suffering and species extinctions. But there are still things we can learn in the attempt. For example, some oppose action to reduce emissions as “too expensive.” Is that a good argument?

Building on previous efforts, a new study led by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientists Nicole Glanemann and Sven Willner attempts a full-on cost-benefit calculation. Like a classic optimization problem, their analysis finds the cheapest combination of mitigation costs and damages—and finds that it’s around 2°C warming.

This kind of analysis requires a few obvious things: the cost of investments that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the economic damage of warming, the mathematical relationship between emissions and warming, and an economic model to drive the whole endeavor.